Soft Porn Sunday: Beatrice Baldwin & Glenn Ratcliffe

First Soft Porn Sunday on the new(ish) blog and it’s one I’ve been promising for ages – months, even – without bothering to get off my arse and do so. Cracking stuff, ILB.

This is, in any case, the third in a series of four sex scenes from Compromising Situations‘ third-series episode Centerfold [insert “shudder at the American spelling” here… again…]; additionally, as with the first two I reviewed, this features Glenn Ratcliffe as lackadaisical photographer Joe who… hell, just go and read the first two, okay? I’ll wait.

Appearance: Compromising Situations, Series 3: “Centerfold” (1996)
Characters: Angela & Joe

So, yeah. This scene takes place on an incredibly fluffy bed with a pretty blue/grey colour scheme (which extends to the curtains and whatever’s going on outside the Perspex window they have there), which both serves as a location and outside fuel for my seething internal jealousy (my bed is about as soft as one of those Whomp enemies from the Mario series). The Sully-themed duvet cover does, however, look a little itchy, so why they’re getting naked on top of it I’ve no idea.

I mean, it’s obvious why they’re getting naked. I’m just slightly distracted by the colour scheme.

There isn’t really a lot of nudity here, for what it is. The scene starts with kissing – and they’re very keen to show you that it’s kissing, judging by the fact that they’ve overlaid kissing sound effects, which cut out suddenly when we cut to Joe doing some odd kind of horizontal kiss on… her breasts? Her collarbone? Random bit of skin? It’s confusing, but it doesn’t matter, because 32 seconds in we fade to insta-sex, SO THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY.

The sex here is positioned in an odd way facilitating it to happen neither under nor on the covers (or maybe they are just trying to avoid the itch); Joe is on top of Angela, or kind of… they are rolling around a bit, but I’m assuming this is meant to be missionary… with the covers pulled down and keeping their feet warm, but the rest of their bodies on display. One does have to wonder exactly why they’re doing neither one nor the other. Softcore doesn’t tend to have this kind of quandary.

There is evidence (or at least pervasive urban rumour) to show that having your feet warm during sex makes for a more satisfying experience. Scientifically, you can lose a lot of heat through bare feet, which lends some credence to the idea, although during good energetic sex you are building up heat, so maybe a fair outlet is beneficial. Whatever. Maybe Joe and Angela are keeping their feet warm to facilitate better lovemaking while also having their top halves bare so they can mutually admire the person they are making love to.

But. y’know, probably not.

It’s nice to see the undersheet also corresponds to the colour scheme, though.

Anyway, so yes, sex. As I said before, Joe is kind of on top here, but they are rolling around a bit so at points it’s a little difficult to tell. At 00:44 we get a quick fade to something more close-up (where we get the first good look at Beatrice Baldwin’s face, which reminds me of Salma Hayek) with yet more overlaid kissing sounds and then one of the least appetising screen kisses I’ve ever seen, but there’s still very little indication that actual sex is happening. It’s clearly meant to be, but this is much more like foreplay than sex (even by softcore standards), and even then, it’s not particularly invigorating.

Maybe it’s all that sex with other women that’s tired Joe out, or something.

The subsequent cut makes this all the more confusing, as Joe (who is doing something odd with his hands as if he’s trying to read Braille) is clearly not meant to be inside Angela, unless he’s somehow fucking her knee (we also get a view of his very square arse, which I hadn’t noticed before and will never now unsee!); if he was meant to be having sex with her before, why isn’t he now? Is this in the wrong order, or are they just trying to be super-realistic and have them take a quick break?

Okay, at this point I have nothing to say because there’s an over-long shot of Beatrice Baldwin’s boobs, so I’ll talk about the music, which is utterly mystifying. It consists entirely of a hi-hat rhythm with apparently random snare and bass drum hits, coupled with a strange ethereal synth line and occasional low thrumming notes (also possibly played on a synth). It doesn’t really sync to the scene, doesn’t actually have any relevance, and is scarily reminiscent of Muzak, which makes me unnerved, as it takes me back to department store lifts in my youth.

After twenty-five seconds of boobs (yes, that’s right – it’s all we see for nearly half a minute), there’s another mix to what, this time, is meant to be sex without pussyfooting around. At least, at this point Angela is riding Joe, so unless she is somehow shagging his belly button, this is full-on penetrative sex, and…

…oh, more kisses. Okay.

Look, I like kisses. They are one of my favourite things. I like to kiss and to be kissed. And I like them in soft porn because they have their place – especially when used strategically, like as a precursor, or footnote, to sex. A kiss can be very powerful. There is, however, a limit, and when you have – as with this scene in pretty much its entirety – multiple kisses of various body parts even when any other scene would have bump’n’grind at this point, that limit has been, shall we say, reached.

Scene kind of ends there with (finally) a full-body shot of them not really doing very much, and a couple of snare drum hits for good measure.

This isn’t a scene I dislike so much as I find baffling. Sex is meant to be happening at certain points, but because there’s very little movement, it’s difficult to discern exactly what those points are. There’s too much of an emphasis on kissing, which would have been fine interspersed with actual sex, but I’m left at the end of this wondering why she had let him inside her in the first place, since neither of them seem to be putting any energy into it. You could achieve the same effect with a cuddle.

And the set design is sound, and Beatrice Baldwin is pretty, and Glenn Ratcliffe is… well… Joe. It has all the makings of a good scene. It is, however, boring, stilted, and uninspired. There are four sex scenes in this episode, so maybe they ran out of ideas?

Or maybe they just had a limited amount of time to film it. I mean, that would explain a lot; we all have things to do that we occasionally run out of time on and never quite fini